The phone on the nightstand started ringing.
That flat, mechanical tring-tring sound echoed through the lavish room. On the oversized European-style bed, a man and a woman lay back to back. The man’s hair was already gray at the temples. The girl, clearly jolted awake, still looked dazed, like her brain hadn’t fully booted up yet.
The phone just kept going. Finally, the girl couldn’t take it anymore. She turned over and gently nudged the man’s shoulder. “Mr. Bell? Mr. Bell, wake up.”
The man didn’t move.
His body felt stiff, like he was sleeping way too deeply. The girl pushed him again, then a few more times. At that moment, the assistant came in. The second he saw her kneeling behind the man, a flicker of contempt crossed his face. Young girl, wasting her youth, selling her body for shortcuts... that was obviously what he was thinking. But he was well-trained, so he kept his mouth shut. He walked over, switched off the alarm, and said coldly, “I’ll handle things here. Miss Thorne, you may go.”
As he bent down, he called, “Mr. Bell? Mr. Bell?”
“Okay.” The girl lowered her head and got out of bed. She had just started toward the bathroom when the assistant suddenly let out a shriek so sharp it was almost hysterical.
“Ahhh—!”
She whipped around in shock.
And then she saw it.
Across the man’s face were broad patches of purplish-red lividity. His lips were a vivid, unnatural scarlet, stretched open in a shape that looked almost like a grin.
A chill shot straight down her back. Her scalp went numb. Her whole body locked up on the spot, frozen so hard she couldn’t even twitch.
No matter how wild her imagination got, she never could’ve guessed that the old man who had shared a bed with her the night before... was now a corpse.
...
Zora Thorne jerked her eyes open and started gasping for air.
Ten years.
And every detail was still burned into her mind like it happened yesterday. The way he had lain flat with his legs bent. The dark red lividity. Those bright red lips. Even that weird alarm tone. Every time she remembered it, her heart still lurched like it was being yanked off a cliff.
Back then, the case had exploded all over the city. The whole thing was a mess. She had been treated like a murderer and investigated for a long, long time. In the end, she wasn’t prosecuted because of insufficient evidence, but that didn’t mean she got her life back. The insults, the gossip, the curses—they stuck to her like shadows.
And that wasn’t even the worst part.
That cold, creeping dread, the kind that made your spine go icy for no reason, haunted her for years. She dropped out of school. Moved away. Broke up with her first love. Even now, she could still remember his bloodshot eyes, the way his fingers had clamped around her throat as he snarled, “Zora Thorne, you expect me to believe you slept in the same bed as some old man and nothing happened? What, do you think I’m an idiot?”
Zora let out a faint, bitter laugh and turned to look out the window.
Honestly, even she hadn’t expected this.
In this lifetime, she still had the guts to come back.
The man sitting beside her immediately seized the chance and, for what had to be the nth time, tried to chat her up again. “Hey, beautiful, bad dream just now? You okay? Traveling alone? What’s your last name?”
Zora steadied herself. Figuring she might as well use this to drag her mind away from the nightmare, she gave him a polite smile. “Thorne.”
He hadn’t expected her to actually respond. The guy lit up at once. “Oh, nice, nice. My last name’s Mercer. Patrick Mercer.” He stuck out his hand, then kept talking without pause. “Beautiful, are you heading to school? What’s your major?”